Students' mother tongue should be used with written instructions for teaching the necessary computer skills before foreign language lessons start.

ICT support should be available throughout the course.

Only a few key tools should be selected for groups with little experience of using social media.

The use of tools should require little or no logging in and passwords. This is especially important with senior citizens who have little experience in using social media.

Number and length of contact lessons

In a blended course: more frequent contact lessons at the beginning both to learn the necessary skills and to create a sense of togetherness within the group.

The lessons should be long enough to properly address both ICT and language problems. 90 minute lessons proved too short. 120 minute lessons were barely adequate.

Tasks and interaction

Tasks should designed so that they are interesting and relevant to the learners. One way to achieve this is to ask the students to form an opinion about something as opposed to finding out facts about the topic.

Interesting, relevant and authentic tasks create more interaction among students.

Maintaining active interaction requires rules about the frequency and schedule of posting and commenting. RSS feeds should be taken into use at the beginning of the course in order to make sure that participants stay on top of most recent postings.

Intervention

Initially, the teacher and students were asked to comment and correct the work produced in Google documents by writing in the documents with different colours. This proved to be confusing and time consuming and did not produce good results. Working with Google documents was successful when the teacher used the commenting option to correct student work. The students were not willing to comment on each other's work at any point during the course.

The teacher should limit correcting students' work to final products, not the language produced during the process and used in mutual interaction.

Forming groups

Differences in language skills are not significant when working in a large groups. However, smaller groups (3-4 students) should be formed so that the differences are not too great.

Students should be allowed to influence forming the smaller groups according to friendships, interests, or practical reasons such as time schedules.

Groups in which the members feel equal to each other work better than groups where there are differences in status, skills etc.